Tracing the history of Irish cuisine

WHAT did people eat for dinner 10,000 years ago? It’s a question Irish chef JP McMahon considers a lot. “I’m always thinking about that period in time,” says the author and food writer.

You can see why the Galway-based restaurateur was tasked with compiling new recipe compendium, The Irish Cookbook. The weighty collection investigates the ‘peasant tradition’ presumption, explores historical and contemporary cooking and champions the produce Ireland naturally offers up. And it turns out, 10,000 years ago, Ireland’s first settlements were busy with people scoffing stuff you’d still recognise today. “The three pinnacle foods would’ve been: salmon, trout and eel,” explains McMahon. “You also had a lot of wild game, duck – particularly mallard – pigeon and woodcock, and then a whole host of indigenous plants, such as wild garlic, nettles.”

People would have also been cracking open oysters and scallops, mussels, cockles and clams, not to mention cooking up dishes of seal, puffin, squirrel and bear. The bears are all gone now though. “I don’t think we ate them all...” McMahon notes wryly.

And, no, he wasn’t allowed to include a bear recipe in the book – despite the fact they “still eat bear in Canada” and “puffin in Iceland”. Seal was eaten “up until the 1950s” in a lot of the islands off Ireland. Flipper for supper, anyone?

When people think about Irish food though – your lamb and barley, beef and Guinness stews – McMahon says, “they’re really thinking about it in the last 200 years. A lot of these recipes only date to the 19th century, and once you go back beyond that point, it gets very, very messy,” he adds.

So messy in fact, you get exotic things like meringue popping up, and more regionally, things like birch wine made from tapping and fermenting the sap of birch trees, “which was a common thing to do”.

McMahon even discovered a recipe for pickled heron. “I had to ask a historian, because I was like, ‘Do you think they meant to say herring?’ But no – people would literally eat anything that would move.

“The fact someone wrote it down would mean it wasn’t something people were eating out of starvation,” he adds, quite impressed. “You had to gut and eviscerate 100 herons – that’s a lot of birds.”

It all makes writing a cookbook about ‘Irish food’ quite difficult – it’s impossible to be definitive. For McMahon, “whatever was eaten in Ireland is part of Irish food” but then that has to include the criss-cross of dishes between Scotland, England and Ireland, the Chinese takeaways on every Irish high street, and his own restaurants, from the Michelinstarred Aniar, to casual tapas joint, Cava Bodega. “When we think about national cuisine, it doesn’t really exist, it is a figment of our imagination.”

When he’s not running his restaurants McMahon pulls together Food On The Edge, an annual international symposium of chefs in Galway, that looks at the future of food.

“For a lot of people, food is just a vehicle for hunger and nutrition. For me, food should be a cultural experience,” he says. “How do we reclaim that?” The Irish Cookbook is a good start.

The Irish Cookbook by JP McMahon, £22